The present invention relates to removable storage devices and, more particularly, to direct access removable media that include writable media.
Audio, video or text content is often stored on removable media that can be moved from one player to another. In many scenarios the user may wish to interrupt consuming a piece of content on one player and resume consumption on another player. For example, one may start listening to a recorded story in his/her car and end listening at home. Similarly, one may wish to view part of a training video at home and see the rest in the office.
Removable media can be categorized into three main groups: tapes, disks (magnetic or optical), and nonvolatile solid state memories. Tapes are sequential by nature, while disks and nonvolatile memories offer random access, i.e. the ability to access directly any segment within the content stored on the medium without passing through other segments. While tape users suffer from the hassle of rewinding and fast-forwarding, they benefit from a unique advantage: when a tape is moved from one player to another, it is positioned exactly at the point of interruption, allowing seamless transition between the first and second sessions. A disk or a solid-state memory, on the other hand, may have the hosting player maintaining the point of interruption as long as it stays in the player, but this point is lost when the medium is removed from the player, thus requiring the user to write down the coordinates of the point of interruption or to browse through the content in order to find this point when the medium is inserted for another session of playback, at same or another player.
There is thus a need to assist users of a random-access removable medium in resuming consumption of content from the point of interruption, even after removal of the medium from the player.